Turner In Twickenham

Turner As the famous painter’s RURAL home, Sandycombe Lodge, reopens to the public after renovation, Amanda Hodges looks how the area inspired his techniques

Richmond upon Thames held an enduring appeal for JMW Turner, one that was about much more than mere geography. The area possessed potent classical associations, thanks to images cemented in the popular imagination by poets such as Pope and Dryden. It was also considered culturally important, celebrated by artists, including the Royal Academy’s first president Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom Turner admired.

The artist had been familiar with the area from childhood. He’d briefly spent time at school in Brentford and, later, kept a sketching notebook while renting there. A proliferation of sketches attest to his abiding interest in the place; the beautiful scenery stimulated his artistic vision. And so, when he was seeking a country abode far away from the intense demands of his London life and, in 1807, the chance cropped up to buy two plots of land in open countryside nearby on the river in Twickenham, he seized the opportunity.

Turner’s early training as an architectural droughts man proved invaluable and he designed the new dwelling himself. First named ‘Solus Lodge’, it later became known as the more congenial-sounding ‘Sandy combe Lodge’. The painter kept a principal base in the capital at Queen Anne Street but had, since 1805, also rented in West 

London. Yet he walked extensively in the area surrounding his new land, often managing 25 miles a day, dashing down beguiling images from his portable paintbox. So, by the time he arrived in Twickenham to build his new house in 1813, he knew the terrain well. With his beloved father, ‘Old Dad’, newly retired from his Covent Garden barbers, he moved upstream for a more leisurely way of life.